Watching MSNBC this morning, I'm struck by how often the unity & bi-partisan message is being put across as Andrea Mitchell & the other talking heads discuss Obama's possible cabinet picks.

Reaching across party lines is important, yes, but WE f*** won. Our people, our progressive leaders, should be the ones under consideration for administration posts.

Enough of this bull* about appointing Republicans to important cabinet posts. If you can pull a Dick Lugar out of the senate, then fine, but otherwise just find the best Democrat available. Hell, Colin Powell is probably available to fill that "unity" slot, so offer him Defense and have done with it.

Why is it that you never hear this narrative when Republicans win? When was the last time a Republican appointed a Democrat to a cabinet post?

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Text of coop yrighted (gettit? coop?) material.  The final analysis of not even having a good back game.

McCain is going to go down as an asterisk in the history books.

Take it away Les Nessman:

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In full-blown panic about an almost certain loss at the polls, conservatives are now trying to win the post-election narrative - they're trying to claim that, despite the election results, the country is still conservative.  The new watchword for conservatives is "center-right nation" - as in Jon Meacham's absurd piece in Newsweek which claimed that despite what looks like a wholesale rejection of conservatism at the polls on Tuesday, "America remains a center-right nation".  David Sirota has been doing yoeman's work beating back this meme, dedicating his column to Obama's FDR-style mandate, and running a Center-Right Nation Watch at OpenLeft.

The notion of this county as a center-right one, despite what the polls may say on Tuesday, appears to be an important part of the conservative post-election narrative.  It will be bolstered by exit polls which show something like 28-33% of the electorate identifying as "conservative", and 17-22% of the electorate identifying as "liberal", with the rest of the electorate identifying as "moderate".  According to the Roper archive of exit polls, ideological self-identification numbers have been hovering in that range since 1976, so if the numbers are substantially different than that on Tuesday, then we know that there's been genuine ideological movement.  Even what looks like a near-loss to conservatives - say, a 26-24% conservative-to-liberal self-identification gap - would actually be a huge victory for progressives.  Failing that kind of self-identification parity, progressives usually argue that we are a nation of "operational progressives", never mind the labels we give ourselves.  That is, that on many issues - especially economic issues - polls show that most people support the progressives point of view.  Campaign for America's Future and Media Matters made this argument most recently with an exhaustive review of recent polling in June 2007.

From the point of view of Election Night and the week following it, though, I think it's better not to bicker and parse over numbers in this way.  We are almost certain to lose that game, since the simple numbers (the ideological self-identification numbers) are least in our favor.  Instead, I think the best approach is to promote the Democratic base as the new center of politics.

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Last week I wrote that we should begin planning for the post-election season, and begin shaping and amplifying our preferred post-election narrative.  I wrote that the ideal post-election narrative would be that Obama won on the strength of a green-collar melting pot coalition, one which values diversity fundamentally, which is keenly worried about the state of the economy, and which supports Obama's economic program of a green-collar, universal health care economy.

The purpose of this narrative is two-fold: first, to cast the election as a mandate for a progressive economic agenda; and second, to shift the demographic center of political discourse away from white Christian men, and towards a more diverse cluster of demographic groups, including women, African Americans, Latinos, young people, non-Christians, and LGBT individuals.  This kind of shift would have a longer-term impact of reducing the subtler forms of racism, sexism, and religious bigotry which have insinuated themselves into electoral coverage.

Since last week, there have been a few important updates on this narrative.

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With Election Day rapidly approaching, it looks increasingly certain that Barack Obama will win the Presidency on November 4; solid Democratic majorities in Congress are essentially guaranteed.  The problem is, what will the headlines be on November 5?

In 2006, a dramatic tidal wave swept Democrats into power in the House and Senate.  The post-election narrative, howerver, focused on the closely-divided chambers, and lionized Rep. Rahm Emmanuel for having coordinated the Democratic victory.  The narrative favored Blue Dog Democrats, and stole a good deal of thunder from the progressive Democratic base.  As a result of that narrative (and existing structural disadvantages), progressive reform was largely stymied, despite some victories in early 2007.  The post-2004 election narrative, with the reification of "values voters" and the false assumption that anti-marriage equality ballot initiatives had pushed Bush to victory, was even more disastrous.

To avoid a similar fate this time around, progressives should prepare to define the post-election narrative for 2008.  Now, I'm well aware of the danger here - there are still 11 days to go, anything could happen, and we shouldn't become complacent.  It is, of course, important to keep working, and we should not let up on that front.  But it's possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Of course, the other problem is that we don't know exactly what the results will be.  Obama could conceivably lose, or he could win a very narrow victory.  We could hit 60 seats in the Senate, or we could fall just short.  And so forth.  Still, I think it's reasonable to predict reasonably that Obama will probably win a solid victory if not an overwhelming one, and that the House and Senate will be considerably more Democratic next year.  Based on those assumptions, I want to suggest a few key themes that we should push to develop before and on Election Night, and to suggest a coherent progressive narrative for Nov. 5.  Follow me across the flip for much more...

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